Francis Brett Young

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Invocation

Whither, O, my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?

   For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,

   And wait on thy appearing,

Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.

Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,

   Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;

   Alas! her presence lingers

No longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.

Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after; --

   Cold and remote were they, and there, possessed

   By a strange unwordly rest,

Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.

The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread,

   Yet when their secret chambers I essayed

   My spirit sank, dismayed,

Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.

Once indeed -- but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture --

   I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes;

   So, suddenly made wise,

Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture . . . .

Whither, O, divine mistress, must I then follow thee?

   Is it only in love . . . say, is it only in death

   That the spirit blossometh,

And words that may match my vision shall come to me?

Prothalamion

When the evening came my love said to me:

   Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool;

The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,

   Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.

Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heat

   Of day had waned; and round that shaded plot

Of secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet:

   Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.

Between that old garden and seas of lazy foam

   Gloomy and beautiful alleys of trees arise

With spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,

   So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies:

Veiled with a soft air, drench'd in the roses' musk

   Or the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove:

No stars burned in their deeps, but through the dusk

   I saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.

No star their secret ravished, no wasting moon

   Mocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:

Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,

   The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.

For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday now

   Were silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,

Nor even a mild-sea-whisper moved a creaking bough --

   Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?

Was ever a moment meeter made for love?

   Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss:

And all your yielding sweetness beautiful --

   Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!

February

The robin on my lawn

Was the first to tell

How, in the frozen dawn,

This miracle befell,

Waking the meadows white

With hoar, the iron road

Agleam with splintered light,

And ice where water flowed:

Till, when the low sun drank

Those milky mists that cloak

Hanger and hollied bank,

The winter world awoke

To hear the feeble bleat

Of lambs on downland farms:

A blackbird whistled sweet;

Old beeches moved their arms

Into a mellow haze

Aerial, newly-born:

And I, alone, agaze,

Stood waiting for the thorn

To break in blossom white,

Or burst in a green flame . . . .

So, in a single night,

Fair February came,

Bidding my lips to sing

Or whisper their surprise,

With all the joy of spring

And morning in her eyes.

Lochnilaun

This is the image of my last content:

My soul shall be a little lonely lake,

So hidden that no shadow of man may break

The folding of its mountain battlement;

Only the beautiful and innocent

Whiteness of sea-born cloud drooping to shake

Cool rain upon the reed-beds, or the wake

Of churn'd cloud in a howling wind's descent.

For there shall be no terror in the night

When stars that I have loved are born in me,

And cloudy darkness I will hold most fair;

But this shall be the end of my delight:

That you, my lovely one, may stoop and see

Your image in the mirrored beauty there.

Lettermore

These winter days on Lettermore

The brown west wind it sweeps the bay,

And icy rain beats on the bare

Unhomely fields that perish there:

The stony fields of Lettermore

That drink the white Atlantic spray.

And men who starve on Lettermore,

Cursing the haggard, hungry surf,

Will souse the autumn's bruisèd grains

To light dark fires within their brains

And fight with stones on Lettermore

Or sprawl beside the smoky turf.

When spring blows over Lettermore

To bloom the ragged furze with gold,

The lovely south wind's living breath

Is laden with the smell of death:

For fever breeds on Lettermore

To waste the eyes of young and old.

A black van comes to Lettermore;

The horses stumble on the stones,

The drivers curse, -- for it is hard

To cross the hills from Oughterard

And cart the sick from Lettermore:

A stinking load of rags and bones.

But you will go to Lettermore

When white sea-trout are on the run,

When purple glows between the rocks

About Lord Dudley's fishing box

Adown the road to Lettermore,

And wide seas tarnish in the sun.

And so you'll think of Lettermore

As a lost island of the blest:

With peasant lovers in a blue

Dim dusk, with heather drench'd in dew,

And the sweet peace of Lettermore

Remote and dreaming in the West.

Song

Why have you stolen my delight

   In all the golden shows of Spring

When every cherry-tree is white

   And in the limes the thrushes sing,

O fickler than the April day,

   O brighter than the golden broom,

O blither than the thrushes' lay,

   O whiter than the cherry-bloom,

O sweeter than all things that blow . . .

   Why have you only left for me

The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,

   And thrushes in the linden-tree?

The Leaning Elm

Before my window, in days of winter hoar

Huddled a mournful wood:

Smooth pillars of beech, domed chestnut, sycamore,

In stony sleep they stood:

But you, unhappy elm, the angry west

Had chosen from the rest,

Flung broken on your brothers' branches bare,

And left you leaning there

So dead than when the breath of winter cast

Wild snow upon the blast,

The other living branches, downward bowed,

Shook free their crystal shroud

And shed upon your blackened trunk beneath

Their livery of death. . . . .

On windless nights between the beechen bars

I watched cold stars

Throb whitely in the sky, and dreamily

Wondered if any life lay locked in thee:

If still the hidden sap secretly moved

As water in the icy winterbourne

Floweth unheard:

And half I pitied you your trace forlorn:

You could not hear, I thought, the voice of any bird,

The shadowy cries of bats in dim twilight

Or cool voices of owls crying by night . . .

Hunting by night under the hornèd moon:

Yet half I envied you your wintry swoon,

Till, on this morning mild, the sun, new-risen

Steals from his misty prison;

The frozen fallows glow, the black trees shaken

In a clear flood of sunlight vibrating awaken:

And lo, your ravished bole, beyond belief

Slenderly fledged anew with tender leaf

As pale as those twin vanes that break at last

In a tiny fan above the black beech-mast

Where no blade springeth green

But pallid bells of the shy helleborine.

What is this ecstasy that overwhelms

The dreaming earth? See, the embrownèd elms

Crowding purple distances warm the depths of the wood:

A new-born wind tosses their tassels brown,

His white clouds dapple the down:

Into a green flame bursting the hedgerows stand.

Soon, with banners flying, Spring will walk the land . . .

There is no day for thee, my soul, like this,

No spring of lovely words. Nay, even the kiss

Of mortal love that maketh man divine

This light cannot outshine:

Nay, even poets, they whose frail hands catch

The shadow of vanishing beauty, may not match

This leafy ecstasy. Sweet words may cull

Such magical beauty as time may not destroy;

But we, alas, are not more beautiful:

We cannot flower in beauty as in joy.

We sing, our musèd words are sped, and then

Poets are only men

Who age, and toil, and sicken. . . . This maim'd tree

May stand in leaf when I have ceased to be.

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